VBI to Develop Bioinformatics Platform using Convey

Today Convey Computer announced it will partner with Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) to develop new reconfigurable computing platforms for life and medical sciences. Designed to deal with the data deluge flooding bioinformatics research, the new platform will use the FPGA-based Convey systems and complementary technologies.

From our end, data are even more rich and intensive and therefore more difficult to analyze than they ever have been. We’ve sequenced the human genome — now we need to go beyond and discover what’s waiting for us in the post-genome era,” explains Dr. Harold “Skip” Garner, executive director of Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. “For example, it is predicted that by 2020 a complete genome sequencing will cost around $300 and be recommended by doctors as part of a full medical evaluation. The data analysis problem will grow non-linearly. We will need new HPC architectures, such as those engineered by Convey, to help get us there.”

VBI has been using Convey hybrid-core computers for over a year now on a diverse suite of research projects including decision and policy informatics, microsatellite analysis, and text data mining. Read the Full Story.

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